Reply to Innovative Ideas to reduce educational disparity

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[quote=Anonymous]It depends on whether you want to improve the optics, gentrify areas to push poverty out/increase the # of residents with higher SES, help a smaller number of low SES students who perform high gain access to better schools, or raise the performance of all students.

1. Optics/ small number -Re-districting and magnet programs only help a small number of poor students. On the pro side- they enable more advanced course offerings so a poor student who is high performing has the option to access a higher level course that normally wouldn't have enough students to support in a low performing school. Another pro is that when the number of low performing/poor students is very low then the peer pressure of the higher performing students kicks in. If you are surrounded by kids who do their homework every night and prioritize grades then in order to fit in you'll start to adopt these habits.  In this scenario, the kid's low performance is very noticeable, flagged early on and the school intervenes quickly. If 40% is failing too the kid isn't going to get individual attention. The cons are that this only works if you have a low poverty rate within your school district, the poverty is distributed where its geographically feasible to redistribute, and you have money to bus kids all over to magnets. The poverty rate for MCPS is way too high for this to have positive impact on very many students, Its more likely to create a negative impact on poor struggling students by hiding them behind the UMC high performing students. Poor kids in the regular programs at Blair, RM, and Poolesville are doing no better than poor kids at other schools. The OOB magnets being located in their schools will give the small number of high performing poor kids an opportunity to excel but its does little for the rest of the kids.

Principals like these approaches because it makes their numbers look better and school systems like the optics of schools appearing to be equal performing even though there is segregation within the school.

2. Gentrify/push out poverty - This only helps poor kids by reducing their numbers so the remaining poor get more resources. This is the magnet argument. If you build an OOB magnet that is rigorous and can attract the highest performing students across the county then you will attract more UMC whites into the area gentrifying the area. Again this only helps the smaller numbers of high performing poor students by giving them an alternative peer group and classes within their school.

3. Raise all poor kids- This requires someone else to run MCPS. The curriculum is a big part of this equation. It must be clear, comprehensive, and require mastering the material before moving to the next section. One of the complaints that MCPS ignored about 2.0 came from poor parents who said they didn't understand it and couldn't help their kids. They felt that their lack of education is what made it incomprehensible to them and MCPS pushed this idea. The wealthy PHd parents also found it incomprehensible but knew it was crap so they supplemented. K-5 needs to drill in the foundation -math facts and skills, grammar, writing and stop farting around with metacognition or whatever trendy edu jargon some Hood College grade heard on a podcast. There needs to be beginning of the year and end of year placement tests in K-5. Any kid that doesn't meet grade level on the end of year placement needs to be required to attend summer school. Any kid that fails the placement test at the beginning of the school year is placed in an intensive remedial class to catch up that includes a required afters school supervised homework club. [/quote]

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